Work Text:
as the spirit watches, larry trainor falls asleep and wakes up in a train yard with john bowers.
this is a memory, of sorts, but it plays out differently, because larry is not the same larry, and john is not the same john. the negative spirit is john, now, and larry is larry but different, and they are both in bodies not quite right for them.
the negative spirit, bodiless, does not have a voice.
this body, though, has a voice.
so the negative spirit speaks.
so the negative spirit lies with him in the bed of the pick-up truck.
so the negative spirit feels contact on lips it does not have, in a recreation of a memory that it has no part of, and it is strange — intimate, but at the same time so detached, so far away, so much distance between them when usually they are one being, interlaced like fingers.
the added distance means the proximity is intoxicating, means every slight touch is a conscious choice, means larry wants it. (whether this is referring to merely the touch or to the spirit itself is irrelevant.)
the negative spirit likes the feeling of beating behind larrys lungs like a second heart during the day. it likes the feeling of larrys hands on its hips and his weight pressing down on it at night. it likes larry and being with larry, and the specifics are not as important.
so it is john often, it is john whenever they speak, because larry will do these things with john, and because john has a body in these dreams and even if it is an illusion, it is more real than anything the spirit can provide. the spirit — john — can talk to him, and he even listens, sometimes — not often, but sometimes, and the spirit can help him this way. things can change this way.
larry does not consider that the negative spirit has been the only person to touch him in decades, because he does not consider it a person, merely a curse.
he does not think about how the spirit shares his bed every night, because from his perspective he sleeps alone.
larry looks at the mirror and sees only himself.
he does not see;
the spirit staring back from the mirror,
the spirit sleeping coiled tightly under his ribs,
the spirit studying every inch of him because it finds it so fascinating, so human, so strange.
this is real to the spirit; it is not real to larry.
so the negative spirit kisses larry, or is kissed by him, and the distinction does not matter. so the negative spirit is larry, or larry is the negative spirit, and the distinction does not matter.
their hearts beat as one, and this is real to the both of them, and the distinction does not matter.